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The nWo angle should have had a much longer shelf life. There are some – Nash included – who think the nWo should have ultimately won some sort of final showdown and that WCW should have been re-branded. There’s no doubting nWo was a stronger brand. Compare the amount of logo merchandise sold.
But things got screwed up.
Hulk Hogan joining the nWo certainly provided a singular moment, definitely the most memorable in the angle’s history. But during the entire span of Hogan’s career in WCW, his involvement was the death knell for anything that worked.
Hogan disciples tend to forget that when Hogan joined WCW as a babyface, he got booed out of the building. When he turned heel, it gave the nWo that much more steam and credibility. But the key to the angle being prolonged was giving WCW some wins back, for the matchup to become competitive.
There were nights the nWo held off the whole company with baseball bats. WCW was made to look weak and inferior. The nWo was the windshield, WCW the bug. Not much of a rivalry. That needed to change.
Hall and Nash did their part. Remember when DDMe took them out with the diamond cutter? But Hogan, as always, had to be invincible.
Soon the nWo was watered down by too many nondescript members – y’know, guys who would do jobs, but they were bums, so it didn’t matter. Then there was the disastrous Wolfpac/B&W split that served only to dilute the most valuable brand name in wrestling. The nWo didn’t get beat. It evaporated. Wrestling’s last great angle ended not with a bang, but a whimper.
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